Debate Recap: Wait, Has the GOP Finally Gotten Serious About 2016?

Inside Milwaukee’s Republican debate: Is this what the end looks like for Donald Trump and Ben Carson?

The giveaway was the password. As I arrived with other political reporters at last night’s GOP debate in Milwaukee, we found taped to our work stations in the press room wi-fi login instructions. The password? “StopHillary.”

​Although the Iowa Caucus is now just 82 days away—and I’m only being slightly ironic with that “just”—the fourth Republican presidential debate looked past Iowa, and the entire primary process, and focused instead on next November 8 and Clinton. After the Summer of Trump and the Autumn of Carson, it seems like the GOP Silly Season is finally coming to a close as it begins to dawn on Republican voters that sending a message is nice, but sending a member of their party to the White House—and keeping Hillary out of it—is better.

​And so that’s why last night you saw Chris Christie—relegated to the undercard debate because of his low poll numbers—virtually ignore the three other Republicans at the kids’ table and train his fire on the Democratic presidential candidate who wasn’t even in Milwaukee. Bobby Jindal did everything short of calling Christie fat, but the New Jersey governor refused to take the bait, instead going on at length about how he’d “prosecute” Clinton if he faced her in the general election. “The question is about who’s going to beat Hillary Clinton,” Christie said after the moderators gave him the opportunity to respond to yet another attack on his record by Jindal. “We need to keep our eye on the ball. I’m going to keep my eye on the ball.”

​The focus on Hillary only intensified in the main debate. After his face-plant in Boulder, Jeb Bush delivered a steadier (although hardly world-beating) performance by foregoing another frontal assault on Marco Rubio and instead attacking, you guessed it, Clinton. After reciting a litany of bad economic numbers and noting that Hillary had given Obama an “A” for his policies, Bush got off the obviously rehearsed but still good line: “It may be the best that Hillary Clinton can do, but it's not the best America can do.” For a politician who has a hard time with face-to-face confrontations—backing down from Donald Trump in the second debate and Rubio in the third—taking on an opponent who wasn’t on stage proved far more effective. In fact, the only time last night that Jeb actually went after one of his Republican opponents was when he challenged Trump on immigration—and then he did so by using the prospect of another President Clinton as his cudgel. After Trump had repeated his standard call to deport 12 million undocumented immigrants, Bush said, “They’re doing high-fives in the Clinton campaign right now when they hear this.”

​Rubio and Ted Cruz, meanwhile, picked up where they left off in Boulder—dominating their second debate in a row. They didn’t mention Hillary by name as much as some of the other candidates, but they didn’t have to. Their campaigns at this point are premised on their electability. In Rubio’s case, that argument is obvious—so obvious that even he seemed embarrassed by the softball of a question debate moderator Maria Bartiromo tossed him about how he’d be able to beat someone as “experienced” as Clinton. Cruz, by contrast, would seem to have a more difficult time making the electability case. (Some Establishment Republicans speak darkly of a Goldwater-type landslide defeat if Cruz wins the nomination.) But Cruz isn’t making his argument against Rubio so much as he is against Trump and Carson—basically telling the outsider candidates’ supporters that he’s a safer bet at the polls. It’s a have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too argument, and judging from the applause in the debate hall and Cruz’s rise in the polls, it’s working.

​Indeed, the most notable thing about last night’s debate was how irrelevant the race’s two frontrunners, Carson and Trump, were to the proceedings. Carson has never been an energetic presence at these debates, and while that worked to his advantage a couple months ago when it was such a refreshing change of tone, it’s hard to see now how it does anything but hurt him. Although Carson delivered a well-prepared answer to the question about whether he’d embellished his biography—“I have no problem being vetted,” he said. “What I do have a problem with is being lied about”—he was lost at sea when talking about the Middle East or the banking industry. Trump, on the other hand, seems to have lost his fastball. Or, rather, his pitches have become predictable. The bombast has gotten stale—so much so that even Trump’s promise to “make America great again” received only tepid, polite applause.

​It may be a mistake to judge a debate by audience response in the hall—after all, these debate crowds aren’t necessarily a representative sample of voters—but it was striking how the loudest applause in Milwaukee was generally reserved for the more mainstream messages. Whether it was Bush denouncing Trump’s deportation plan or Rubio branding Rand Paul an isolationist, the Republican race seems to finally be falling into its old, familiar rhythms. As Hillary has risen in the polls and cemented her status as the inevitable Democratic nominee, it seems to have dawned on Republicans—candidates and voters alike—that they need to get serious about stopping her.

​Will they? At various moments last night, Rubio, Cruz, Christie, and even Jeb all gave signs that they’re capable of doing so. Then again, there were some hitches, too—from Rubio’s callowness to Cruz’s Trumpian immigration stance. Even that “StopHillary” password had some issues. When it came time for me to file this piece, the RNC’s wi-fi in the media center was on the fritz, so I had to send it from my hotel.